# MineGAN++: Mining Generative Models for Efficient Knowledge Transfer to Limited Data Domains

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.13742 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13742/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 71 of its 98 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [How Can We Know What Language Models Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12543/) (2019)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Survey on Generative Modeling with Limited Data, Few Shots, and Zero Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14397/) (2023)
- [Transferring Unconditional to Conditional GANs with Hyper-Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02219/) (2021)
- [Text-Image Conditioned Diffusion for Consistent Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11774/) (2023)
- [Geometry Preserving Loss Functions Promote Improved Adaptation of Blackbox Generative Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23888/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

GANs largely increases the potential impact of generative models. Therefore, we propose a novel knowledge transfer method for generative models based on mining the knowledge that is most beneficial to a specific target domain, either from a single or multiple pretrained GANs. This is done using a miner network that identifies which part of the generative distribution of each pretrained GAN outputs samples closest to the target domain. Mining effectively steers GAN sampling towards suitable regions of the latent space, which facilitates the posterior finetuning and avoids pathologies of other methods, such as mode collapse and lack of flexibility. Furthermore, to prevent overfitting on small target domains, we introduce sparse subnetwork selection, that restricts the set of trainable neurons to those that are relevant for the target dataset. We perform comprehensive experiments on several challenging datasets using various GAN architectures (BigGAN, Progressive GAN, and StyleGAN) and show that the proposed method, called MineGAN, effectively transfers knowledge to domains with few target images, outperforming existing methods. In addition, MineGAN can successfully transfer knowledge from multiple pretrained GANs.